I thought this was useful in response to the posts that the "sanctity of life" is part of the reason for restrictions on abortion.

Quote:

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis released the results of a massive study—more than 9,000 women participated—on the effects of making birth control more widely available. And how did they make birth control more widely available? They gave it away for free. And it turns out that making birth control available to women at no cost, which is what the president is trying to do, reduced the teen birth rate by more than 80 percent (from 34.3 births per 1,000 teens on average to 6.3 births per 1,000 for teens enrolled in the study), and it reduced the number of abortions by 62–78 percent (from 19.6 abortions per 1,000 women on average to 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women enrolled in the study).

A person can't call himself pro-life and oppose access to birth control (or Obamacare!). If you do oppose access to birth control—or you oppose Obamacare because it expands access to birth control—you're not really pro-life. You're just anti-sex

Yes, there are those opposing abortion and birth control at the same time, but there are many who are pro life and pro birth control. I don't agree that an argument like sanctity of life is invalid because some people's beliefs are hypocritcal.

Also, I don't think most restrictions on abortion are coming from pro choice/ "middle ground" people who think there should be "reasonable" limits, but people who are against abortion entirely, but can't outlaw it and are trying to find another way.

That Dan Savage column is really awful (he suggests the letter writer fake a pregnancy as a test for her boyfriend!), but the comments are interesting. This is my fav:

Quote:

What I've never understood is WHY it matters if a fetus is a person, and whether or not it should be given rights equal to what a person has. NO PERSON has the right to use another person's body for their survival without their permission. Even if they will die without the use of that person's body. Even if the use of that person's body would be a minor inconvenience at worst to that person. It isn't about giving a fetus rights equal to a person's, it's about reducing a woman's rights until she is viewed as being less than a person.

Exactly. I don't actually care if the fetus is a person or not... it's clearly alive and probably feels pain from a pretty early stage. I'm really bothered by a lot of the pro-choice rhetoric that seeks to deny the fetus as a living being that feels pain because it so clearly echoes the rthetoric that's used to dismiss animals as living, feeling beings. I don't eat mussels and scallops because they count as living, feeling beings to me... so of course the fetus is a living, feeling being.

But none of that matters. Because anything that's growing inside my body? I get to decide what happens to it. No one else gets to make decisions about it. I could have Albert freaking Einstein living in my uterus, and it would still be okay for me to "abort" him if I wanted to, because it's *my* body, and to act as though the fetus's right to life cancels out my right to my body? That the "personhood" of the fetus is more important than my "personhood"? That is pretty forking crazy.

I do worry about about violence against fetuses and violence against women's bodies. That's why I support Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide birth control. That's why I want our culture to be more supportive of mothers and children. But it would never, ever lead me to believe that women should be denied the right to abortion.

The only truly pro-life belief is that all stuff in the universe should be converted from inert star dust into biological matter. Examples of pro-life policies and research goals: figuring out how to transmute less biologically useful elements into more useful material, researching alternate biologies, colonizing the solar system, and building habitats out of like trees or whatever. Eventually, if we're serious about it, devising von Neumann machines to endure the void between stars and land on other plants, pooping out life when they get there..

Everyone else is just frontin'.

I think I love you.

_________________I tend to hook up with people who give me chocolate, but I fail to see how this is a bad thing./tofulish

I will round down and declare that 85% of all abortions already take place in the first 12 weeks. With that said, why does there need to be restrictions about abortion after that? Why make someone who is dealing with a traumatic situation jump through hoops to "prove" to some bureaucratic body that they have a "good" reason for wanting to end their pregnancy?

No one here has really provided an answer to that. This mythology that women arbitrarily seek to end their pregnancies at 39 weeks is sexist nonsense based on ignorance about what really happens.

_________________A whole lot of access and privilege goes into being sanctimonious pricks J-DubDessert is currently a big bowl of sanctimonious, passive aggressive vegan enduced boak. FezzaYou people are way less funny than Pandacookie. Sucks to be you.-interrobang?!